Multimodal Discourse Analysis On The Senior High School English Textbook Advance With English

Textbook is an important tool for realizing English curriculum objectives, crucial foundation for teachers to design and carry out teaching activities, major source of getting language knowledge and developing language skills for students. More and more scholars have begun to pay attention to do researches on textbook. With the development of information technology and word processing technology, the textbook compilation has shifted from monomodal to multimodal style. As for the change of the textbook, the perspectives of studying the textbook discourse also shifted, that is, from monomodal discourse analysis on textbook discourse consisting of only texts to multimodal discourse analysis on textbook discourse consisting of texts, photographs, cartoons, colors, graphs and other semiotic resources. The semiotic resources can be classified into two major modes:verbal modes (texts) and visual modes (including phtographs, graphs, cartoons, colors, etc.). As an crucial part of textbook, reading section ocuppies the largest proportion of English teaching. In addition, developing students’reading ability and skills has been key point of English teaching. So the author chooses the senior high English textbook Advance with English as the research material, and the study focuses on the reading section, hoping to help teachers have a better understanding of multimodality of the reading section, help students to develop multiliteracies. and give suggestions for improving textbook compilation.Multimodal discourse analysis is a new discourse analysis approach which draws upon the social semiotic theory of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. Researchers have achieved a lot in this field, among which Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar is a quite mature theoretical system for approaching multimodal discourse analysis. The thesis takes Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar and Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity theory, from the perspectives of representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual modes, and the intersemiotic complementarity between visual modes and verbal modes, to do multimodal discourse analysis on the reading section of Advance with English. The study aims to investigate and address the following research questions:1) What are the features of visual modes in the reading section of the textbook Advance with English? 2) What are the relations between verbal modes and visual modes? 3) How do they work together to construct discourse meanings?In order to address the research questions above, the study mainly investigates them from three aspects. First of all, it focuses on the representational meaning of visual modes in the reading section and the ideational intersemiotic complementarity between verbal modes and visual modes; the second and third part will be devoted to the interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual modes respectively. The research findings show that:the reading section of Advance with English displays quite obvious multimodal features; the visual modes and verbal modes interact coherently with each other; the textbook compilers exploit various semiotic resources, such as, texts, colors, cartoons, photographs, pictures, etc., and they work together cooperatively to construct meanings. In the reading teaching process, teachers need to notice the multimodal features of the reading section of the textbook, and guide students to learn the multimodal resources and cultivate students’ multiliteracies.